Slow Cooker Chocolate Cherry Steel Cut Oatmeal

This slow cooker chocolate cherry steel cut oatmeal is waiting for you when you wake up in the morning. Start your day with a delicious comforting bowl for breakfast.

There’s a slow cooker category on this site and after almost four years, it has a whopping six recipes in it.

For a “small” appliance that takes up an entire shelf of a corner cabinet, that’s pretty pathetic.

None of them happen to be breakfast recipes either and after a week of single digit temperatures and a freezing cold house in the morning before we get the wood stove going again (because of course the year we get a wood stove to offset the insane cost of heating a house in NY, the price of oil plummets), I could really get behind an already cooked comforting breakfast that I can eat under my wool blanket on the couch with a cup of coffee.

Since it happens to be National Oatmeal Month (yeah, that’s a thing apparently), slow cooker steel cut oats seemed like the perfect solution.

A boring bowl of beige oats didn’t seem too exciting though which is exactly where dark chocolate and cherries come in.

Any morning that starts with chocolate is a win by me but adding cherries and not just any cherries, but deliciously tangy and good- for- you tart cherries, makes this breakfast even better.

Montmorency tart cherries (sometimes known as sour cherries) are rich in vitamin A and pack a nutrient punch to your breakfast that’s just an added bonus to their amazing sweet and sour taste.

The combination of chocolate and tart cherries in this recipe is like taking a bite of black forest cake with every spoonful.

Cake for breakfast? Um yes, please.

So while these cherries are great in everything from smoothies, to drinking the tart cherry juice straight up or even throwing them in your bowl of cereal, I’ll be cozying up with a bowl of this comforting chocolate cherry steel cut oatmeal until the temps reach at least freezing again.

I would love to do this but I’m a diabetic. That would send my blood sugar soaring. Not to mention that I am the only one that will eat it in my house. So if u make adjustments I would love to give it a try.

With fall in the air, time to think about oatmeal, which I live preparing in the slow cooker. This recipe looks enticing, but can anyone name grocery chains that sell dried or frozen tart cherries? I’ve been looking unsuccessfully in the mid-Atlantic area for years – wish they were not so scarce!